The Meta Movie Pain of Matt Damon

by thethreepennyguignol

I watched Eurotrip last week (it wasn’t until I was rereading this till I realised I’d misspelt it as Erotrip, which sounds like the most sensual bus journey of all time). My thoughts on it are essentially irrelevant (as is most of the putrid movie), apart from the identification of an ever-more relevant on-screen phenomenon: Meta Movie Pain. I’ve accidentally named it to be a collection of words so hipster that I can’t talk about it without flinching and therefore can only postulate my theory in writing. Here goes.

The symptons can be seen in the “Scotty Doesn’t Know” scene, where Matt Damon plays a rambunctious cock who stoats his way through a song about banging a girl who’s cheating on her boyfriend with him. If you look really closely, you can see a glimmer of all his other roles- Tom Ripley, Will Hunting, even bloody Jason Bourne-trapped in the this Guantanamo Bay of acting. It’s the look in an actor’s eyes as they realize to want extent they are pissing on their credibility, and is specific to actors who were once good. Or at least not Keira Shitely. Some actors don’t seem to be afflicted by this: James Spader in Secretary, for example, seems perfectly able to quell this inner turmoil when presented with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s naked derriere. That said, even his more thinky roles involved him screwing Rosanna Arquette’s leg wound and, in a far more disturbing scene, making love to Andie McDowell, so his ability to feel any sort of remorse is clearly already in question.

It can be seen on television, on occasion: every cast member of How I Met Your Mother has moved onto or already done good things, and you can see the thundering, crushing embaressment behind their eyes from Season 7 onwards. Weep for them. Weep for Glee’s Jane Lynch too, a brilliant comic actress trapped in the biggest American disaster since the sinking of the Lusitania.

So I’ve decided to set up a charity to help these emotionally impoverished stars and coincidentally not to pay to get the vodka stains removed from my favourite jacket: Cheering Up for the Nominally Talented. Give generously.